Pressed inthe pages of time
Stone, charcoal, and amber capture the look
of ancient flowers, many of them extinct.
During the Miocene epoch 10 to 20 million
years ago, tree sap engulfed a Dominican
legume flower (above), hardening into amber
and freeze-framing the pollen as if windblown.
Miocene flowers, relatively recent in geologic
time, resemble the highly evolved flowers of
today. Not so for those that emerged in the
Cretaceous, more than 100 million years ear
lier. Such fossils recovered from clay pits in
southern England by paleobotanist Chris Hill
(facing page) indicate that the earliest flowers
were tiny and lacked conspicuous petals. His
finds support those of paleobotanist Else
Marie Friis, whose minuscule specimens are
mounted on disks and kept in plastic cases
(left). Each disk holds two or more fossil
flowers that have been sprayed with gold to
sharpen images made by a scanning electron
microscope (background). Turned to charcoal
in primeval forest fires, the fossils reveal the
simple elegance of primitive angiosperms.
THE BIG BLOOM
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